The Bohemians

Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

"I never write 'metropolis' for seven cents," Mark Twain said, "because I can get the same money for 'city.' " Ever the businessman, Twain never forgot that writing was a trade as well as an art. And the city where he received some of his earliest on-the-job training was San Francisco.

As Ben Tarnoff argues in "The Bohemians," his stylish and fast-paced literary history, the city's "greatest gift to Twain was its Bohemia." Led by witty Bret Harte, this little circle of unconventional writers and intellectuals turned San Francisco into a cultural haven during the Civil War. They wrote poems and stories, and relished the freedom of their isolation on the Pacific Coast while the battles raged back East.

Their colorful history is familiar to many, but Tarnoff breathes fresh life into his narrative with vivid details from the archives at UC's Bancroft Library, giving us a rich portrait of a lost world overflowing with new wealth and new talent. In Twain's case, that world became a kind of graduate school, adding a little polish to his rough education in the college of hard knocks.

It immersed him in a wonderfully diverse and sophisticated environment, which included the sadly neglected gay writer Charles Warren Stoddard and the fiercely independent poet Ina Coolbrith. What connected all the writers in Harte's circle was, in Tarnoff's words, "their contempt for custom, their restlessness with received wisdom. They belonged to Bohemia because they didn't belong anywhere else."

In that early dawn of the city's cultural life, no other place in America had more "newspapers and writers in proportion to the total population." It was as if the Gold Rush had also created a frenzied race for literary reputation. With his good looks, "subtle irreverence" and sharp editorial eye, Harte seemed the most likely to succeed, and in the late 1860s he hit pay dirt with such gems as "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat."

But close on his heels was his friend Samuel Clemens, whose star began to rise in San Francisco shortly after he arrived from the mining camps of Nevada with the newly minted pseudonym of Mark Twain, and a dubious reputation for creating outrageous journalistic hoaxes. When Harte met him in 1864, he was unimpressed by the young man's careless dress, but noticed something remarkable in his eyes, which were "so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me."

He was immediately invited to write for the Californian, Harte's fancy new journal, and was paid the princely sum of $50 a month for contributing just one article a week. It was an important break for the apprentice writer, and he wrote proudly to his mother that he was working for "the best weekly literary paper in the United States."

For several years, Twain would remain under Harte's spell, and was happy to defer to his judgment in literary matters even after they went their separate ways. When he wrote his first full-scale book, "The Innocents Abroad," he sent the manuscript to Harte, who told him what to cut from the bulky mass of pages, and - said Twain - "I followed orders strictly."

But Harte ran into trouble when he went East and sought to build on his success as a writer in California. While Twain found fame and fortune in his new hometown of Hartford, Conn., his old friend suffered one disappointment after another. In the late 1870s, his star was quickly fading when one of America's richest men - Andrew Carnegie - wrote the most stinging explanation of the writer's failure: "A whispering pine of the Sierras transplanted to Fifth Avenue! How could it grow? Although it shows some faint signs of life, how sickly are the leaves."

Even Twain lost respect for Harte and would later complain bitterly that his fallen idol suffered from being "showy, meretricious, insincere." Indeed, it is the stunning decline of Harte's career that calls into question the rather ambitious claim in Tarnoff's subtitle that the San Francisco Bohemians "reinvented American literature."

For one thing, it took a long time for American literature to realize that it had been reinvented, and then it was Hemingway who noted the real source of the change: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

By the time he wrote his masterpiece, Twain had come a long way from his days in California and had found the magic streak of genius that Harte and all the other Bohemians could only admire from afar. But it is also true that, without the early support he found in a San Francisco uniquely suited to his needs, Twain might never have developed the hardy literary talent that - unlike Harte's - survived transplantation.

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